Women at work at the telephone switchboard, 1914 (Library of Congress)

In the mid-20th century, in response to the United States’ rapidly expanding telephone network, executives at the Bell System introduced a new way of dialing the phone. Until then, for the most part, it was human operators—mostly women—who had directed calls to their destinations.

Dialing systems had reflected this reliance on the vocal cord. Phone numbers weren’t numbers; they were alphanumeric addresses, named after phone exchanges that encompassed particular geographic areas. The Elizabeth Taylor movie Butterfield 8gets its name from that system: The Butterfield exchange served the tony establishments of Manhattan's Upper East Side. Lucy and Ricky Ricardo, should you have attempted to call their apartment, were apparently reachable with a request for "Murray Hill 5-9975."

That system evolved, slowly. In 1955, AT&T—after it researched ways to minimize misunderstandings when it came to spoken phone directions—distributed a list of recommended exchange names featuring standardized abbreviations. (Butterfield 8 would become, under that system, BU-8; Murray Hill 5-9975 would have been shortened to MU 5-9975.) But engineers at Bell had been conducting their own research into the scalability of the name-and-number system. They had ambitions to expand the national phone network; their own research had concluded, among other things, that the country could not supply enough working women to meet its growing demand for human operators.

Automation, Bell concluded, would be the future of telephony. And "All-Number Calling"—no names, anymore, just digits—would be the way to get there.

***

I want to tell you about the controversy the Bell System's embrace of numeracy provoked—how resentful some people became when their familiar method of making phone calls was taken from them. I want to tell you about why the change was necessary, and how it still informs our conception of phone calls and text messages. I want to tell you about the future of the phone number.

But first I want to tell you about the Central Coast of California.

You used to be able to access this sparkling little section of the country, over the phone, by dialing the 408 area code; in 1998, the area stretching south of San Jose, and on down the coast to King City, was split off. It all became, suddenly, 831.

California's current code scheme (NANPA)

I grew up in Carmel, smack in the middle of the new code region; my first cell phone number—the only cell phone number I have ever had—bears that 831 preface. I have held on to those three digits through happily-multiple changes of location (New Jersey, New York, Boston, Washington) and through unhappily-multiple losses of handset. The powers that be—hardware salespeople, cell service representatives—have, at one time or another, tried to force me into a 609 and a 917 and a 617; each time, I have resisted. Because I am not, fundamentally, a 609 or a 917 or a 617. I am not even, my current residence notwithstanding, a 202. I am an 831, wherever I may be in body, and will remain an 831 until they pry those three otherwise totally meaningless digits out of my cold, dead iPhone.

Of course we didn’t know it at the time, but now it seems that the atomization of area codes was a prelude to the microtargeting that fuels political campaigns and advertising: it refined our perceptions of who people are. When I grew up in the San Fernando Valley, it and all the rest of L.A. was 213. You had to travel a long way to get out of 213, which might have subtly enforced the fallacy that L.A. was actually a coherent city rather than a mere patchwork. Sure, there were always ZIP codes to differentiate fancy neighborhoods from nondescript ones, but a phone number was and is part of an introduction—it’s a calling card in itself, not merely numbers on your actual calling card. You give people your phone number if you like them, not your ZIP code.

So when the Valley became 818 when I was a kid, suddenly the Valley’s separateness became more tangible to me. We weren’t all in it together any more. If you gave someone your phone number you instantly revealed yourself as an other to someone from 213, which covered the side of the city that was cooler than the Valley and its cheesy suburban sprawl. My grandparents lived in 213 and consequently they suddenly seemed more urban to me. Even that image is outdated, though, now that L.A. has even more area codes. My grandparents’ old place has shifted from 213 to 310. The associated vibe is more specific: it’s “West side” rather than “more urban, more interesting half of town.”

Area codes, of course, weren't always simply symbolic. When a "long-distance" call had a monetary value assigned to it, moving meant changing your phone number, almost by default: You couldn’t very well ask your new friends and acquaintances to pay long-distance fees each time they gave you a call. The rise of monthly cell service, with its flattening of the national phone grid, transformed the area code from an economic signal into a purely cultural one—and one that has the ever-more-rare virtue of connecting its owner to a physical place. You could liken an area code, now, to a sports team affiliation. Or to an alma mater. Or to an insistence that soda is properly known as "pop."

“It feels to me a little bit like a screen name,” says Philip Lapsley, the author of Exploding the Phone: The Untold Story of the Teenagers and Outlaws Who Hacked Ma Bell. Long ago divested of its original role, the three-digit code now functions as a kind of shared social media handle, a collective identity. It’s no longer something to be remembered—we have our phones for that—but is instead something to be talked about. I meet someone at a party. We exchange numbers. “Oh, 510!” I might say. “I was in Oakland a few weeks ago!”

We'd owe that conversation, in some part, to the Bell System. And to the 10-digit coding system the telecom giant introduced to, and on behalf of, the American public half a century ago. Which brings us back to 1962.

Bell had begun rolling out its numeric system, the North American Numbering Plan, a decade earlier. Recognizing that users of the phone system (as users of any technology are wont to do when transition comes along) would likely resist the change, the group did so slowly, and strategically. It built in long grace periods for people to accommodate themselves to the new numbers. It produced pamphlets methodically explaining the new system.

Still, people protested. In San Francisco, a group sprang up to battle Bell and its numbering scheme. The Anti-Digit Dialing League—consisting of thousands of members at its height, including the semanticist S.I. Hayakawa—decried Bell's version of digital transition. The all-digit dialing system was evidence of "the cult of technology,” the League argued, not to mention that cult’s "creeping numeralism." To make its point, the group published its own pamphlet—one that was aptly, if vaguely, titled Phones Are for People. "So far," it noted, "17 million of the nation's 77-million phones have lost their letters in favor of numbers. The time to reverse the trend is NOW."

The League’s concerns weren’t merely humanistic. The 10-digit codes Bell was proposing for its system, the collective feared, would also make numbers too difficult for people to remember, encouraging dialing mistakes. Pragmatically and morally, the argument went, All-Number Calling was wrong. One of the League’s members, invoking one of the nation's more patriotically named phone exchanges, got epic about it: "Give me Liberty,” he cried, “or take the blinking phone out."

An ad for automation and its "secret service" (Wikimedia Commons)

The League took to an extreme the anxiety many Americans felt at the changes that Bell, the behemoth corporate interest, was imposing on their behalf. As John Brooks put it in his book Telephone: The First Hundred Years,

All-Number Calling—it is clear in hindsight—stood in the minds of many for the age of the impersonal, when people live in huge apartment buildings, travel on eight-lane highways and identify themselves in many places—bank, job, income tax return, credit agency—by numbers.

Those concerns feel familiar today, as we continue to navigate well-worn anxieties that pit human labor against automated, and things that are named against things that are numbered. Individual privacy was a concern even in those early days of telephony—one common argument against human phone operators being that automation would make surveillance of phone calls less likely. People feared, too, that phones would replace in-person interaction, that the new technology would compromise that precious, precarious thing we shorthand as “humanity.”

They didn’t fear that enough to stop Ma Bell, though. The Anti-Digit Dialing League, under the legal counsel of “King of Torts” Melvin Belli, won a brief restraining order against the phone company. It lost, however, pretty much everything else. By 1964, the defenders of the named phone exchanges had abandoned their defense. The nation and its citizens would be, from then on, identified by numbers alone.

***

Another thing that seems clear in hindsight: The massive corporation, in this case, was correct. From the earliest years of the telephony, advocates had called for an automated system of dialing—not just for reasons of privacy, but also for reasons of practicality. Human operators may have added that friendly touch, but they were relatively inefficient; automated labor, it was clear, would scale much more readily than its human-conducted counterpart.

Some trace the advent of the telephone number itself—the numeric aspects of the old alpha-numeric exchange addresses—to a measles outbreak that struck Lowell, Massachusetts, in the late 1870s. The doctor Moses Greeley Parker, a friend of Alexander Graham Bell and an investor in his then-fledgling phone company, noted that, if the town’s four phone operators ended up quarantined in the epidemic, finding and training replacements would be an almost insurmountable challenge. The system needed to minimize its reliance, he argued, on the vagaries of human memory.

People feared that phones would replace in-person interaction, compromising that precious, precarious thing we shorthand as “humanity.”

The North American Numbering Plan—the system of codes we still rely on, in augmented form, today—was a recognition of Parker's argument. It was also, like so many other utilities we rely on for our everyday infrastructure, a corporate creation.

Engineers at Bell Labs designed the numbering scheme beginning in the early 1940s and working into the next decade. They took advantage, in that, of a supremely rare and an even more supremely geeky opportunity: to design a system, from scratch, that would ensure a maximum amount of efficiency for a maximum number of phone users. The area codes that lead our own phone numbers today—212, 202, 415—were direct results of their work.

They were also based on a particular type of hardware: rotary phones. To use those phones, you placed a finger in the hole of the number you intended to dial, then rotated the dial clockwise until you hit the phone's finger stop. What this translated to, as far as the phone was concerned, was a series of clicks. Lower numbers on the phone, starting with 1, registered a lower number of clicks than the higher ones. What this translated to for the human user was less time required for dialing.

Flickr/janhendrik.caspers

The system Bell's engineers devised married the hardware of the rotary phone to the machines that would provide the infrastructure for the nation's expanding phone network. Computers, back then, were primitive. To ensure that area codes would be recognizable to the computers that were to translate the codes into geographical areas, the engineers created a system that placed either a 1 or a 0 as the second digit in each area code. (Those with 0 in the middle indicated states with only one area code—hence DC’s 202 and Florida’s 305—while those with a 1 denoted states with multiple codes.) The system meant that those early computers would be able to distinguish between a long-distance area code and a local number. Which meant in turn that they could route calls across the nation, to regions of the network and finally to local networks.

“The vine-like network of this community's telephone plant will grow tomorrow like an atomic age descendant of Jack the Giant Killer's beanstalk.”

When it came to creating the area codes for the country, the engineers also made their plans with maximum efficiencies in mind. New York, the most densely populated area of the nation, got 212—2-1-2 containing the lowest number of clicks possible on the rotary phone. Los Angeles got 213—the second-lowest—while Chicago got 312, and Detroit got 313. Anchorage, Alaska, on the other hand, got 907, which required 26 clicks from the person doing the dialing. To make the system even more efficient and human-confusion-proof, engineers also ensured that codes resembling each other (say, Oregon's 503 and Florida's 305) were distributed far apart from each other on the map.

The whole scheme “illustrates how smart the Bell engineers were back then,” Phil Lapsley points out. They were trying to design a system that was user-friendly—with the user, in this case, being the nation as a whole. They were also trying to design a system that would be, as much as possible, future-proof. There were, given the possible permutations of the rotary dial, 152 potential area codes. At first, only 86 of these were assigned. The engineers, in outfitting their new network, had given it room to grow.

***

The Bell System's new codes were first introduced to the public in the early 1950s, as part of a larger push toward automated, or Direct Distance, dialing. Bell, true to form—and recognizing the semi-audacity of its new numbering scheme—rolled them out in a way that will feel familiar to any current user of Facebook or Twitter: through beta testing. The company chose, as area codes’ introduction city, Englewood, N.J., which was conveniently located near Bell Labs and featured, as a bonus, switch equipment that was easily adapted to automation.

From there, it proceeded cautiously, and strategically. Once the company had chosen Englewood as its test city, it began a long public-education campaign in the area, explaining—through newspaper articles and pamphlets and movie shorts—how to use the new dialing system. "To reach a distance telephone," read a guide distributed in Englewood, "all you need do is first dial the Area Code, and then the desired telephone number. Be sure to enter the Area Code for distant points in the address book with the telephone number."

On November 10, 1951, the official rollout of area codes took place. With 100 guests watching, Englewood Mayor M. Leslie Denning dialed a number: 415-LA-3-9727. Exactly 17 seconds later, Denning’s call was picked up by Frank Osborn, the mayor of Alameda, California. Bell engineers called the cross-continental and intramayoral conversation a "historic first in communications." And newspapers, for their part, were even more jubilant about the proceedings. As The New York Times put it in an article announcing the Englewood test-call, “the vine-like network of this small community's telephone plant will grow tomorrow like an atomic age descendant of Jack the Giant Killer's beanstalk.”

***

As the network grew, it also became more complex. Splits and overlays of area codes, especially as the population of phone users grew in the 1980s and 1990s, became common. Lapsley points out that, when codes split—as 408 did in 1998, leading to 831—there can be resentment and even anger associated with the division. As the communications scholar James Katz told Gene Weingarten in 1998: "When we are assigned an area code we do not like, it feels like a loss of place or position in society. It is one means of alienation. We are losing our sense of place."

And those lucky few who get to keep their sense of place get to gloat about it. New York’s 212 (as opposed to 917 and 718) is now a sought-after commodity; so is 415 (versus 510 for the East Bay and 925 for the East-East Bay). Pitbull brags about being not just "Mr. Worldwide," but also "Mr. 305." Vermont’s 802 code, for its part, has become a kind of regional meme. “Someone asked me recently if it’s a pot reference,” one seller of 802-branded t-shirts noted.

***

So who has control over the numbering system today? That honor belongs, officially, to a 12-person team working out of an office in Sterling, Virginia: the current administrators of the North American Numbering Plan. For a brief period in the 1990s, it was Lockheed Martin that oversaw that administration; after Lockheed got involved with telecom concerns, however, the FCC decided that it needed a neutral and non-governmental body to administer the nation's numbers. Lockheed's numbering division divested itself and became Neustar, which remains under contract with the FCC.

Any changes made to the existing system are "going to include the numbers that we have today."

John Manning is the Senior Director of NANPA at Neustar, overseeing the nation's numbering system on behalf of the FCC and the rest of us. He spends a lot of time thinking about phones and phone numbers. He also spends a lot of time thinking about the future of telephony—which includes, of course, the Internet. "The Internet offers up a lot of opportunities, but it also opens up a lot of issues that aren't necessarily there today," Manning told me. There are, for one thing, security concerns to think about—ensuring that numbers dialed over VOIP, for example, get properly routed to their intended destinations.

There are also resource concerns: As individuals, we're getting, what with Skype and Google Voice and their many equivalents, more and more phone numbers. And the 10-digit numbering system currently in use throughout the U.S., Canada, and U.S. territories is, Manning points out, "a finite resource." He doesn't see that deci-digital system changing anytime soon: Like the Bell employees of the last century, Manning appreciates the power of user habit when it comes to our technological infrastructure. NANPA, he points out, takes pains to make transitions like area code splits and overlays as seamless as possible for those affected by them.

At the same time, he recognizes that the Internet has changed how we communicate—with our voices and with so much else. So while the priority, he says, "is to keep the 10-digit numbering plan for as long as possible," it remains a question how long, exactly, that will remain possible. Some have speculated that the current numbering plan will remain sustainable only until 2038—at which point NANPA may need to add one or two digits to each phone number. The codes that have become so familiar to us—so meaningful to us—may change. Not completely, but a little bit. The history of commercial telephony, Manning points out—from those public switchboards to VOIP—has been "a continuum." Any changes made to the existing system, he says, are "going to include the numbers that we have today." They may simply be expanded versions of the plan that those Bell engineers laid out last century. As Manning puts it: "We have to make sure that we can continue the evolution."

Most Popular

His paranoid style paved the road for Trumpism. Now he fears what’s been unleashed.

Glenn Beck looks like the dad in a Disney movie. He’s earnest, geeky, pink, and slightly bulbous. His idea of salty language is bullcrap.

The atmosphere at Beck’s Mercury Studios, outside Dallas, is similarly soothing, provided you ignore the references to genocide and civilizational collapse. In October, when most commentators considered a Donald Trump presidency a remote possibility, I followed audience members onto the set of The Glenn Beck Program, which airs on Beck’s website, theblaze.com. On the way, we passed through a life-size replica of the Oval Office as it might look if inhabited by a President Beck, complete with a portrait of Ronald Reagan and a large Norman Rockwell print of a Boy Scout.

Should you drink more coffee? Should you take melatonin? Can you train yourself to need less sleep? A physician’s guide to sleep in a stressful age.

During residency, Iworked hospital shifts that could last 36 hours, without sleep, often without breaks of more than a few minutes. Even writing this now, it sounds to me like I’m bragging or laying claim to some fortitude of character. I can’t think of another type of self-injury that might be similarly lauded, except maybe binge drinking. Technically the shifts were 30 hours, the mandatory limit imposed by the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education, but we stayed longer because people kept getting sick. Being a doctor is supposed to be about putting other people’s needs before your own. Our job was to power through.

The shifts usually felt shorter than they were, because they were so hectic. There was always a new patient in the emergency room who needed to be admitted, or a staff member on the eighth floor (which was full of late-stage terminally ill people) who needed me to fill out a death certificate. Sleep deprivation manifested as bouts of anger and despair mixed in with some euphoria, along with other sensations I’ve not had before or since. I remember once sitting with the family of a patient in critical condition, discussing an advance directive—the terms defining what the patient would want done were his heart to stop, which seemed likely to happen at any minute. Would he want to have chest compressions, electrical shocks, a breathing tube? In the middle of this, I had to look straight down at the chart in my lap, because I was laughing. This was the least funny scenario possible. I was experiencing a physical reaction unrelated to anything I knew to be happening in my mind. There is a type of seizure, called a gelastic seizure, during which the seizing person appears to be laughing—but I don’t think that was it. I think it was plain old delirium. It was mortifying, though no one seemed to notice.

Why did Trump’s choice for national-security advisor perform so well in the war on terror, only to find himself forced out of the Defense Intelligence Agency?

How does a man like retired Lieutenant General Mike Flynn—who spent his life sifting through information and parsing reports, separating rumor and innuendo from actionable intelligence—come to promote conspiracy theories on social media?

Perhaps it’s less Flynn who’s changed than that the circumstances in which he finds himself—thriving in some roles, and flailing in others.

In diagnostic testing, there’s a basic distinction between sensitivity, or the ability to identify positive results, and specificity, the ability to exclude negative ones. A test with high specificity may avoid generating false positives, but at the price of missing many diagnoses. One with high sensitivity may catch those tricky diagnoses, but also generate false positives along the way. Some people seem to sift through information with high sensitivity, but low specificity—spotting connections that others can’t, and perhaps some that aren’t even there.

“Well, you’re just special. You’re American,” remarked my colleague, smirking from across the coffee table. My other Finnish coworkers, from the school in Helsinki where I teach, nodded in agreement. They had just finished critiquing one of my habits, and they could see that I was on the defensive.

I threw my hands up and snapped, “You’re accusing me of being too friendly? Is that really such a bad thing?”

“Well, when I greet a colleague, I keep track,” she retorted, “so I don’t greet them again during the day!” Another chimed in, “That’s the same for me, too!”

Unbelievable, I thought. According to them, I’m too generous with my hellos.

When I told them I would do my best to greet them just once every day, they told me not to change my ways. They said they understood me. But the thing is, now that I’ve viewed myself from their perspective, I’m not sure I want to remain the same. Change isn’t a bad thing. And since moving to Finland two years ago, I’ve kicked a few bad American habits.

Why the ingrained expectation that women should desire to become parents is unhealthy

In 2008, Nebraska decriminalized child abandonment. The move was part of a "safe haven" law designed to address increased rates of infanticide in the state. Like other safe-haven laws, parents in Nebraska who felt unprepared to care for their babies could drop them off in a designated location without fear of arrest and prosecution. But legislators made a major logistical error: They failed to implement an age limitation for dropped-off children.

Within just weeks of the law passing, parents started dropping off their kids. But here's the rub: None of them were infants. A couple of months in, 36 children had been left in state hospitals and police stations. Twenty-two of the children were over 13 years old. A 51-year-old grandmother dropped off a 12-year-old boy. One father dropped off his entire family -- nine children from ages one to 17. Others drove from neighboring states to drop off their children once they heard that they could abandon them without repercussion.

Democrats who have struggled for years to sell the public on the Affordable Care Act are now confronting a far more urgent task: mobilizing a political coalition to save it.

Even as the party reels from last month’s election defeat, members of Congress, operatives, and liberal allies have turned to plotting a campaign against repealing the law that, they hope, will rival the Tea Party uprising of 2009 that nearly scuttled its passage in the first place. A group of progressive advocacy groups will announce on Friday a coordinated effort to protect the beneficiaries of the Affordable Care Act and stop Republicans from repealing the law without first identifying a plan to replace it.

They don’t have much time to fight back. Republicans on Capitol Hill plan to set repeal of Obamacare in motion as soon as the new Congress opens in January, and both the House and Senate could vote to wind down the law immediately after President-elect Donald Trump takes the oath of office on the 20th.

Trinidad has the highest rate of Islamic State recruitment in the Western hemisphere. How did this happen?

This summer, the so-called Islamic State published issue 15 of its online magazine Dabiq. In what has become a standard feature, it ran an interview with an ISIS foreign fighter. “When I was around twenty years old I would come to accept the religion of truth, Islam,” said Abu Sa’d at-Trinidadi, recalling how he had turned away from the Christian faith he was born into.

At-Trinidadi, as his nom de guerre suggests, is from the Caribbean island of Trinidad and Tobago (T&T), a country more readily associated with calypso and carnival than the “caliphate.” Asked if he had a message for “the Muslims of Trinidad,” he condemned his co-religionists at home for remaining in “a place where you have no honor and are forced to live in humiliation, subjugated by the disbelievers.” More chillingly, he urged Muslims in T&T to wage jihad against their fellow citizens: “Terrify the disbelievers in their own homes and make their streets run with their blood.”

A professor of cognitive science argues that the world is nothing like the one we experience through our senses.

As we go about our daily lives, we tend to assume that our perceptions—sights, sounds, textures, tastes—are an accurate portrayal of the real world. Sure, when we stop and think about it—or when we find ourselves fooled by a perceptual illusion—we realize with a jolt that what we perceive is never the world directly, but rather our brain’s best guess at what that world is like, a kind of internal simulation of an external reality. Still, we bank on the fact that our simulation is a reasonably decent one. If it wasn’t, wouldn’t evolution have weeded us out by now? The true reality might be forever beyond our reach, but surely our senses give us at least an inkling of what it’s really like.

The same part of the brain that allows us to step into the shoes of others also helps us restrain ourselves.

You’ve likely seen the video before: a stream of kids, confronted with a single, alluring marshmallow. If they can resist eating it for 15 minutes, they’ll get two. Some do. Others cave almost immediately.

This “Marshmallow Test,” first conducted in the 1960s, perfectly illustrates the ongoing war between impulsivity and self-control. The kids have to tamp down their immediate desires and focus on long-term goals—an ability that correlates with their later health, wealth, and academic success, and that is supposedly controlled by the front part of the brain. But a new study by Alexander Soutschek at the University of Zurich suggests that self-control is also influenced by another brain region—and one that casts this ability in a different light.

A new survey suggests many might prefer a kind of multipolar Washington, with three distinct orbits of power checking each other.

Does Donald Trump have a mandate?

Though last month’s election provided Trump and his fellow Republicans unified control of the White House, House of Representatives, and Senate for the first time since 2006, the latest Allstate/Atlantic Media Heartland Monitor Poll shows the country remains closely split on many of the key policy challenges facing the incoming administration—and sharply divided on whether they trust the next president to take the lead in responding to them.

In addition, on several important choices facing the new administration and Congress, the survey found that respondents who voted for Trump supported a position that was rejected by the majority of adults overall. That contrast may simultaneously encourage Trump to press forward on an agenda that energizes his coalition, while emboldening congressional Democrats to resist him.